Women allegedly forced into prostitution to pay off their drug debts will not face criminal charges, federal prosecutors announced Friday, the same day that documents charging alleged pimp Jeremy Mack with human trafficking were unsealed.

“The victims in this case are just that — victims of crime and will be treated accordingly,” Mike Tobin, spokesman for U.S. Attorney for Northern Ohio Steven Dettelbach, said in a statement. “They will not face criminal charges. Instead, we have been working and will continue to work to get them the help and services they need.”

Mack, 37, and Ashley Onysko, 23, were arrested on local charges when Elyria police raided a Tattersal Court house from which the pair was allegedly running their online prostitution ring. Federal human trafficking charges against Onysko were unsealed Thursday.

Mack, who has a lengthy criminal record, allegedly lured young women, including a 16-year-old girl, into his prostitution business by selling them heroin and cocaine and then when they couldn’t pay offering to trade sex for drugs.

Ultimately, the women’s drug debts became too much for them to pay and Mack used violence and intimidation to hold them at his house, forcing them to go to area hotels to have sexual relations with as many as 10 clients in a day, FBI Special Agent Kelly Liberti wrote in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court.

More than a dozen men, including a doctor, a man who claimed to work for the Brooklyn Diocese and a guard at a high-end security firm, were hauled before a judge Monday to face charges they patronized a sex-trafficking ring run by cab drivers.

Twelve of the 14 pleaded not guilty to charges they paid between $200 and $500 for prostitutes pimped out by cabbies, who were arrested earlier this month after the Manhattan District Attorney’s office caught wind of their alleged illicit backseat business.

Prosecutors said the women were held as virtual hostages, forced to have sex with clients in hotel rooms, apartments and even the back of their captors’ taxis in exchange for just enough cash to survive. One victim was even made to get a barcode tattoo, prosecutors said.

They come in diverse shapes and sizes, these females, with names like Jumoke and Onazotsena and Ekaete and Chigozie. Their families, usually among the nearly 60 percent in the population who live on less than one dollar a day, struggle to make ends meet. The bare-boned irony is that Nigeria, suffering from the so-called “curse of black gold,” remains the largest crude oil producer in Africa (Angola, Libya, and Algeria are not far behind). More than USD $600 billion in oil revenues have flowed into Nigeria since its independence in 1960, accounting for about 90 percent of the country’s export earnings. Of that $600 billion, the World Bank reports that $300 billion has been stolen and stored in foreign bank accounts.

But those billions have not trickled down to the majority of the 160 million people who call Nigeria home.

So under the crushing weight of poverty, families often use their children to raise supplemental income and prostitution has become a readily taken path.

Recruiters of sex workers fabricate stories of a fantastic life in Europe to naïve girls who simply want money to go to school, to women who believe their dreams of a better life may be actualized outside of the country’s borders, to anyone frustrated with the seeming hopelessness of the life of the poor in Nigeria.

The trafficking of persons is the third largest crime in Nigeria after economic fraud and the drug trade according to UNESCO, and while some victims remain in Nigeria or in neighboring countries, thousands eventually end up in Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Turkey, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, England, Russia, and increasingly in South America.

The United Nations estimates that 10,000 Nigerian girls are prostituting just in Italy alone, where most of them are managed by a Nigerian mafia-styled criminal network.

THE LIE: Human trafficking only happens in poor, undeveloped countries.

THE TRUTH: Human trafficking is an international and domestic problem. Women are lured into the illegal sex trade from within Canada and outside Canada. The illegal sex trade is very much alive and well in British Columbia, and throughout the rest of Canada.

THE TRUTH: Prostitution in some cases is human trafficking. Varying degrees of sex slavery range from fear-based bondage where a worker may have freedom to roam the streets, but is expected to return with profit to a pimp, to physical bondage in a brothel, where women and children have been transported away from their home and held in captivity in order to perform sex acts that profit a sex trade ring or pimp. In many cases, threats and acts of physical violence hold the women and children in a state of actual or perceived slavery.

THE LIE: Johns (sex trade consumers) are usually awkward, sex addicts that can’t find a girlfriend or date.

THE TRUTH: Many Johns are everyday men. He could be a student, a tradesman or the CEO of a company. He could be married, divorced, widowed, in a serious dating relationship or single. He may have a sex addiction, but he is almost always looking for a sense of power. He may believe he is either helping the girls or that he is not hurting anyone because both parties are consenting adults. A John can also be someone looking for the “girlfriend experience”. He is often longing for help, but he doesn’t realize he needs it.

THE LIE: All women working in prostitution, strip clubs, escort agencies and sex massage parlours choose their profession for the lifestyle and money. They are living the “Pretty Woman” dream by setting their own terms of work and keeping all the money they earn.

THE TRUTH: There is evidence that some workers in the sex trade are trapped in modern sex slavery. They are lured by a boyfriend or recruiter posing as a friend or potential employer. Some are sold into the industry by their fathers, brothers or husbands. After recruitment, these women are trapped by drug addiction and debt bondage to a pimp, gang or sex trade ring.

Flores grew up in an upper-middle class catholic home. Many years ago she found herself in the same situation as some of the young women she now helps.

Flores says she moved around a lot. Her father had a good job, and her parents were very strict. They landed in Birmingham, Michigan.

“I was basically just your normal teenager who was starved for attention and there was somebody who was there to say exacted what I wanted to hear,” Flores recalls.

During high school, Flores says she was targeted by some older boys at school. One day one of those boys offered to drive her home.

“He didn’t take me home. He took me to his house…he offered me a pop, and it was laced with something. He proceeded to rape me, and then his cousins were there taking pictures. And it wasn’t revealed to me until several days later that they had a plan…I was to earn them back.”

Flores was blackmailed into having forced sex with strangers. Two years later the Flores family moved to another city far away from Birmingham. That’s how she escaped.

But many survivors of domestic sex trade don’t escape, she says. “Most will die in it.”

It’s a telling statistic – courtesy of Forbes Magazine – that takes a look back at the scene in Indianapolis during the just-concluded Super Bowl week.

“Over 1,000 listings were posted this week on Backpage.com in Indianapolis, advertising “young,” “curvy” women and girls for in-calls and out-calls, “un-rushed” body rubs and “total” satisfaction. Of that number nearly a quarter reference the Super Bowl.”

The key word in the above paragraph is “young” which can be understood as code for “underage” in the seamy underground world of pimps and sex predators who look to lure underage victims into the criminal interstate flesh-peddling trade.